A few minor cavils. He says that I was “taught” in school that America was a Christian nation. This is not what I actually meant to convey; it is more a question of what I was not taught. The question, in effect, was not addressed at all, and if this was the case for me I assume it was for most people of my generation and beyond (I was born in 1956).

Mr. Novak says that “Jefferson’s reasoning was that Christianity (steeped heavily in Judaism) is the best religion a Republic could have, and it was his duty, as Chief Magistrate, to lend it his public support.” A reading of Jefferson’s very extensive private writings paints a different picture, especially as they contrast with his brief and desultory public statements on the subject, and his small and grudging gestures toward the nation’s Christian majority. He can only have agreed with John Adams when Adams wrote to him that “You have suffered, and I have suffered more than You, for want of a strict if not a due Observance” of the principal that one should honor the nation’s gods. Mr. Novak ignores Jefferson’s well-publicized opinion of Christianity as “our particular superstition” and of the “priests of Jesus” as “mountebanks.” When Jefferson declined in the face of considerable pressure to insert the name “Jesus Christ” into the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, he did so in order to include “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.”

Mr. Novak certainly has a point when he identifies “two wings” that make up the United States. “Common sense” may be a good definition of one wing, but his term “humble faith” for the other is just a little bit disingenuous. A faith whose adherents (or at least a significant proportion of them) see themselves as “saved” and believe that people of other religions and even of other denominations are headed toward hell cannot be called humble. Mr. Novak provides a different justification for his use of the word “humble,” but I must maintain that it is an inappropriate term when only too often, today, we hear torrents of rage and intolerance issuing from America’s pulpits.

Mr. Novak does not agree with my opinion that the collaboration between the two wings has begun to break down, saying that one-third of Republicans do not attend church while one-third of Democrats do. These figures still indicate a real gap, and the gap might appear wider if he were to tell us which denominations are favored by each party. What percentage of today’s Unitarians, for example (the favored church of Adams and Jefferson) are Republicans? What percentage of evangelicals are Democrats? It is very, very difficult for the two wings to be reconciled to one another when Wing A thinks that Wing B is damned and Wing B thinks that Wing A is insane. Leaders on both sides encourage this reductivism.

I will not post any more blogs on the subject, because the whole reason I wrote Moral Minoritywas to acquaint the general reader with the actual words and thoughts of the Founders themselves on this subject, rather than with the endless and Jesuitical interpretations of these words and thoughts by politically driven journalists and bloggers (I won’t say “such as ourselves”). Anyone who is truly interested in the subject, interested that is in what the Founders really thought, would do better to read the original sources, which are more than eloquent. My own recommendations would include James Madison’s Detached Memoranda and his “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments”; Jefferson’s “Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom” and Notes on the State of Virginia; the correspondence between Jefferson and Adams, and the correspondence between Adams and Benjamin Rush. The letters to the Christian Rush show a rather different side to Adams than those to the openly skeptical Jefferson, which makes everything all the more fascinating.